Thousand Words
by Lucinda
Summary: Willow gets a bit of reassurance from Spike.  Not shippy.


author: Lucinda

rating: pg13

main characters: Spike and Willow

disclaimer: I do not own any characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Inspired by the song 'A Thousand Words' by Savage Garden.

distribution: Wic, Bite Me, WLS, Quick-Fics, Paula - anyone else ask.

note: set in the beginning of season 6, may be semi-AU.

Willow clutched her jacket closer, feeling cold as she walked along the street. Tears flowed down her cheeks, ignored. She didn't really care if there were tears, if her eyes were leaking. After all, nobody else cared, why should it matter to her?

She'd brought Buffy back from the dead. It had been for everyone, for the safety of Sunnydale, for the safety of Dawn and Xander and for Spike's poor broken heart. Because everyone was so torn up inside about Buffy's death, because Sunnydale was becoming infested with demons and vampires caused by the lack of a Slayer.

So she'd done something to change that. First, she'd reprogrammed Spike's Buffy-bot, so that it would handle the legal matters, fill in for Buffy at school functions and for the social workers. Modified it a little more to handle patrolling, to kill vampires and demons if they happened to cross the bot's path.

But the Buffy-bot hadn't been enough. It had slowed the slide into disaster, but hadn't stopped it. Maybe if they'd been able to get a capable Slayer, maybe even if they'd had Faith, trigger happy and unstable though she may have been, things could have worked. But they didn't. They'd needed a Slayer, needed Buffy.

What had emerged from the grave had looked like Buffy, but she wasn't the same Buffy anymore. She had all of Buffy's memories, but... things were different. Buffy was acting cold, harsh and angry all the time. She was using Spike for sex, something that the Buffy of before would never have done. Somehow, Buffy had come back different.

And that was somehow her fault.

Dawn was furious with her for 'ruining' Buffy, for 'tarnishing the happy memories with this travesty'. Tara thought that she was using too much magic, bordering on addiction to the power. Xander was acting weird, and she wasn't certain if it was the resurrection, the amount of power it had taken, or something to do with his relationship with Anya - they didn't talk enough anymore for her to know. Buffy... oh, goodness, Buffy was acting as if Willow had done something terrible to her, but Willow had no idea what she had done.

"Shouldn't you be with your friends?" The voice was behind her, a subtly mocking inflection on the word 'friends'.

Willow didn't even turn around. "Spike. Fancy meeting you out here. What friends would those be? Dawn's not speaking to me, Xander has some issue that he won't talk about, Tara... don't even get me started on that one. Or maybe Buffy, the person whose been glaring at me since... since she got back?"

"You finally noticed that, did you?" He paused, blowing a small ring of smoke. "Stopped listening to the words and started listening to how they said them?"

"Did everybody know before me?" She felt as if something inside was teetering on the edge of a precipice.

"Life's not easy, Red. Things get all tangled, relationships change, people grow in different ways, and all that rot." He moved closer, reaching out to brush his fingers over her sleeve very lightly. "You shouldn't feel like you have to change who you are."

"Why do they all act like it was wrong of me to bring Buffy back? They wanted her back, you wanted her back." She felt more tears prickling at her eyes.

"I wanted the Buffy that we had before." The words slipped from Spike's lips as if against his will. "But she's not the same. Now, don't you even try to apologize for it, Red. Dying changes you, and that's a simple fact. Buffy was dead, and it changed her. She's not the same person that she was then, just like nobody else is quite the same today as they were in the spring."

"But they blame me for it. Dawn thinks it was my spell." Willow's words carried the weight of her pain.

"Bollocks to that." Spike frowned. "Plain fact is that she wasn't perfect then, and she still isn't. I know what you were trying to do, and that you were doing it for us, for all of us. Even me. But things aren't all peachy. Fact is that your gang's friendships are starting to fester and rot, like a month dead corpse. Things aren't good, and I don't know if they can be fixed."

Willow winced at his imagery, but couldn't argue with his words. "Painful."

"Don't let them get you down. All those words... it's just noise. Just little bleatings about how things aren't good, and they want to blame someone else. It wasn't your fault, ducks." Spike looked at her, his expression unexpectedly serious.

Looking at him, Willow almost asked why he cared about her pain, why her personal agony mattered to him. But she swallowed the words back down, to grateful that he cared to question why. "Promise? Will you help me remember that?"

Leaning forward, Spike pressed a kiss over her forehead. "Promise. I won't let you back down, red. You wanted to help them, and you did your best to do that. Not your fault they can't take it the rest of the way."

For now, it was almost enough. Willow walked with Spike, feeling better than she had in weeks. Pale tracks glittered on her cheeks, the now dry salt catching the moonlight. For now, Willow wasn't alone. For now, it was enough.

end A Thousand Words.


End file.
